Andrew Medhurst, Head of Consulting at Inspire People, on why founders should nail the problem before reaching for the technology, and why a set of values nobody lives by will cost you the people you need.
Most companies write their values in an afternoon and put them on the website. It costs nothing until the first serious hire reads that page, asks about it in the interview, and works out from the answer that nobody in the room could name all three.
Andrew Medhurst is Head of Consulting at Inspire People, which builds technology teams for public bodies and for the health tech companies selling into the NHS, including the platform engineering teams behind Genomics England’s work on the 100,000 Genomes Project. He has been recruiting for 28 years, long enough to have watched a lot of founders work out in the same order that the hard part was never the technology.
His second piece of advice comes with an obvious caveat, which is that employer value propositions are one of the things Inspire People sells. It is worth hearing anyway, because the failure he describes is one most founders can recognise in their own company. We asked him what the role involves, why health tech matters to him, and what he would tell a founder about to start hiring.
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Original Transcript
I’m Andrew Medhurst, Head of Consulting at Inspire People.
My role is to work with founders from startups, scale ups, and we also work with public bodies as well, including the NHS. We provide an array of services from advisory, talent projects, particularly around talent attraction and employer branding.
HealthTech and MedTech by its own definition will create or have a massive impact. We hope, all hope, a massive positive impact on our futures. You know, health is the most important commodity. If you like that, we own that we have. I mean, we have to be healthy human beings otherwise without your health. What do you have? So I think it’s so vitally important. Extremely important.
You want to really think about the problem that you’re trying to solve. Really nail that problem down. And then see how technology can really help you in providing a solution to meet that problem or that challenge.
My top tips, particularly for founders and owners, is to really think about your mission and your values, and why people would want to work for your organisation. And once you nail those values down. Make sure they’re values you actually live by, as opposed to a tick box exercise and and develop a really strong employer value proposition.
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Inspire People works with public bodies, private to public delivery partners and health tech scale-ups on technology hiring and employer branding, with NHS-facing work at Genomics England, Lifebit and the Francis Crick Institute. More at inspirepeople.net.
Video by Nathan Taylor, Video Production Lead at Global Good, and Founder of NT91 Photography.
